Note 195.1 — Chapter VII · DEATH AND BIRTH AS TRANSFORMATION.

Without tarrying to discuss these ballads any further, let me refer briefly to three variants of an unmistakably antiquated character collected among the Santal aborigines of Bengal. In one of them the maiden is drowned by her seven brothers’ wives. She reappears as a bamboo growing on the embankment of the tank where she had lost her life. Out of the bamboo a fiddle is made which, when played, seems to wail as in bitter anguish, and moves the hearers to tears. It is acquired by a village chief. In the absence of the household the maiden comes out of it and prepares the family meal. The chief’s son watches, discovers and marries her. A second version relates that the maiden was given by her brothers to the water-spirit to obtain water in a tank they had made. Right in the middle of the tank where she was drowned there sprang up an upel-flower, the purple sheen of which filled the beholder with delight. The bridegroom, to whom she had been betrothed previously to her sacrifice, comes to claim his bride, and gathers the flower. Ere the bridal procession reaches the bridegroom’s dwelling on its return, the flower has become the bride. The third version is more striking still. Here the heroine was eaten by a monkey. The monkey died, and from the place where his body decayed a gourd sprang and grew, and bore a fruit. A banjo was made of this gourd, which emitted wonderful music and sang the maiden’s fate. Her sister, the rani, cheated the minstrel out of the instrument and hid it in her own room. There the maiden, coming out, was discovered by the rajah, her sister’s husband; and matters were arranged more happily than in the Scottish ballad, by the two sisters’ sharing one spouse.195.1